4. For all its geographical (and cosmographical) distribution, the incidence of fukamiphobia remained a very rare occurrence in medical practice, and on its own it would hardly have led to any changes in the law. However, the epidemic of fukamiphobia very quickly turned from a medical problem to an event of a social character.
August 81. The first registered protest of fathers, still individualized (complaints to local and regional medical authorities, separate appeals to local officials).
October 81. The first collective petition of 124 fathers and two obstetricians to the Commission for the Protection of Mothers and Infants under the World Council.
December 81. At the XVII World Congress of the Association of Obstetricians: physicians and psychologists first speak out against mandatory fukamization.
January 82. An initiative group, VEPI (named after the founder’s initials), is formed, uniting doctors, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and lawyers. It was VEPI that started and brought to victory the struggle to pass the Amendment.
February 82. The first protest rally by opponents of fukamization in front of the World Council building.
June 82. The formal formation of the opposition to the law within the Commission on Protection of Motherhood and Infancy.
Further chronology of events is not interesting, from my point of view. The time (three and a half years) necessary for the World Council to study the Amendment from all sides and then pass it is sufficiently typical. However, what does not seem typical to me is the relationship between the number of mass proponents of the Amendment and the numbers of the professional corps. Usually, the number of mass proponents of a new law is at a minimum ten million people, while the professional corps, qualified to represent their interests (lawyers, sociologists, specialists in the give issue) is only several dozen people. In our case, the mass proponents of the Amendment (the “refusers,” their husbands and relatives, friends, sympathizers, and people who joined the movement our. of religious or philosophical considerations) were never truly a mass movement The total number of participants in the movement never exceeded half a million. As for the professional corps, the VEPI group alone al the time of passage had 536 specialists.
5. After the Amendment was passed, the refusals did not stop, even though their number diminished noticeably. Most importantly, during the year 85, the character of the epidemic changed. Actually, the phenomenon could no longer be called an epidemic. Whatever laws it had had (“the chains of refusals,” geographical concentration) disappeared. Now, the refusals were completely random, individual; and motivations A and B were no longer encountered. Now there were references to the Amendment. Apparently, that is why doctors today do not see refusals to be fukamized as manifestations of fukamiphobia. Amazingly, many women who had categorically refused fukamization and had played an active role in the campaign for the Amendment now have lost interest completely in the question and don’t even use the right granted by the Amendment when they give birth. Of the women who refused fukamization during the years 81-85, only 12 percent refused a second time. A third referral is very rare: only a few cases were recorded in fifteen years.
6. I feel I must stress two circumstances.
a). The almost total disappearance of fukamiphobia after the Amendment was passed is usually explained by well-known psychosocial factors. Modern man accepts only those limitations and requirements that stem from moral and ethical orders of society. Any limitation or requirement based on other considerations is met with (unconscious) hostility and (instinctive) inner protest. And naturally, once they achieved freedom of choice in fukamization, people lost the basis for hostility and became neutral toward fukamization, as toward any other medical procedure.
Taking this consideration into account, I stress, nevertheless, the possibility of another interpretation — one that is of interest within the framework of theme 009. To wit: the story related above of the appearance and disappearance of fukamiphobia can be easily explained as the result of a concentrated, well-planned action of a certain rational will.
b). The epidemic of fukamiphobia corresponds well in time with the appearance of the Penguin Syndrome. (See my report No. 011/99.)
Sapieti sat,
T. Glumov
[End of Document 4.]
Now I can maintain with total assurance that it was this report of Glumov’s that forced the shift in my consciousness that led me finally to the Big Revelation. And, funny as it may seem now, that shift began with the uncontrollable irritation brought on by Toivo’s crude and unambivalent hints about the alleged role of the “verticalists” in the history of the Amendment. In the original of the report, that paragraph is covered with thick marks in my hand; I remember quite well that I was planning to call Toivo on the carpet for his overactive imagination. But then I was given information on the Wizard’s visit to the Institute of Eccentrics, I finally got the point, and I had no time for calling people on the carpet.
I was in a cruel crisis, because I had no one to talk to. First of all, I had no propositions. And secondly, I did not know with whom it was safe to talk now, and with whom it wasn’t. Much later, I asked my group if they found anything strange about my behavior in those horrible (for me) days of April 99. Sandra was engrossed in the Rip Van Winkle theme and was bowled over himself and noticed nothing. Grisha Serosovin maintained that I was particularly silent then and replied to all initiatives on his part with a mysterious smile. And Kikin is Kikin: even then, “everything was clear” to him. Toivo Glumov must have been driven crazy by my behavior then. And he was. However, I really did not know what to do! One by one I sent my coworkers to the Institute of Eccentrics and waited each time to see what would happen, and nothing would happen, and I would send the next one and wait some more.
At that time, Gorbovsky died at his place in Kraslava.
At that time, Athos-Sidorov was preparing to go back into the hospital, and there was no certainty that he would return.
At that time, Danya Logovenko invited himself over for a cup of tea for the first time in many years and spent the whole evening reminiscing, chatting nonsense.
At the time, I decided nothing.
On the night of May 5, the emergency service got me out of bed. In Little Pesha (on the Pesha River, which falls into the Czech inlet of the Barents Sea), some sort of monsters had appeared, creating panic in the villagers. The emergency squad was sent out to examine the site.
According to the rules, I had to send one of my inspectors to the site. I sent Toivo.
Unfortunately, Inspector Glumov’s report on the events and on his actions in Little Pesha has apparently been lost. In any case, I have not been able to discover it… However, I would like to show how Toivo performed that study in as detailed a manner as possible, and therefore I will have to resort to a reconstruction of the events, basing it on my own memory and on conversations with participants in that event.
It is not hard to see that the reconstruction being offered (and all the ones that follow) contains, besides absolutely reliable facts, some descriptions, metaphors, epithets, dialogues, and other elements of fiction. But I need for the reader to see the living Toivo before him, the way I remember him. Documents alone are not enough. If one cares, however, one can examine my reconstructions as a special kind of deposition.
LITTLE PESHA. 6 MAY 99. EARLY MORNING
From above, Little Pesha looked just the way that village should look at ‘three in the morning. Sleepy. Peaceful. Empty. A dozen multicolored roofs in a semicircle, a grass-covered square, several gliders standing around, the yellow club pavilion by the cliff over the river. The river seemed motionless, very cold, and uninviting; clumps of whitish fog hung over the reeds on the other side.
On the club porch, his head thrown back, a man stood watching a glider. His face seemed familiar to Toivo, and there was nothing amazing about that: Toivo knew many emergency-squad members — probably every other one.
He landed next to the porch and jumped out onto the damp grass. The morning here was cold. The emergency-squad man was wearing a huge, comfy jacket with numerous special packets, with nests for all their cylinders, regulators, extinguishers, igniters, and other objects for perfect emergency work.
“Hello,” said Toivo. “Basil, isn’t it’!”
“Hello, Glumov,” the man responded, offering his hand. “Right. It’s Basil. What took you so long?”
Toivo explained that zero-T wasn’t working here in Little Pesha far some reason, that he was let out at Lower Pesha and had to take a glider there and fly over forty minutes above the river.
“I understand,” Basil said, and looked back at the pavilion. “That’s what I thought. You see, in their panic they mutilated their zero-T cabin…”